With A Whimper – Review Of Doctor Who: The Angels Take Manhattan

Well, I’ll give last night’s episode of Doctor Who this much: it made me queue up the Weeping Angels origin episode “Blink” on streaming Netflix to help me put my finger on what went wrong with “The Angels Take Manhattan”. The short answer? Almost everything.

“The Angels Take Manhattan” was intended to be an emotional send off for the Doctor’s most recent companions, Amy and Rory Pond. Here’s a spoiler up front: the Ponds are sent away into the past to a fixed point in time where, apparently, the Doctor can never see them again. Given that it’s been established that the Doctor needs to be around others on a near constant basis in order to remain somewhat centered, if not completely sane, the ending of this episode should have competed with Old Yeller for tear jerker of the millennium. However, convoluted story telling, hype, and lack of attachment to Amy Pond as a character worth caring about, as compared to other Companions, served to kill this episode in its crib.

More spoilery disappointment, after the jump.

Sore Tooth: Superman #0 Review

You ever had a low-grade toothache? You know, the kind where you feel a little zip when you suck cold air past it? The kind of thing where you find yourself constantly inhaling sharply, trying to see if maybe its gone away, or if maybe it’s getting worse? And you find yourself worrying that maybe it actually is getting worse, and you just wish the damn thing would go away so you could concentrate on something else?

Over the course of the past year, Scott Lobdell has become my toothache.

Superman #0 is a pretty bad comic book. It wallows in exposition, alien cliches, and stilted dialogue. It tries to turn Superman’s parents into some kind of asskicking science heroes for some reason, and it implies that Oracle is now some kind of all-knowing, all-seeing space jerk, which should win back all the female readers Lobdell lost with Red Hood and The Outlaws. And it does all this with art that, while pretty enough in a stylized way, serves in places as examples of some of the worst visual storytelling that I have seen in a comic book in 36 years.

Superman #0 made my hangover worse this morning. After reading it I needed to watch my Blu-Ray of The Avengers again too recover any hope for the superhero genre. It made my stool loose and burny. If it had come out two and a half months ago, it would have caused riots in downtown San Diego.

It’s really not very good, you guys.